Generic URI things

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 10:16:57AM +0000, Miles Sabin wrote:
> > Yes, but - and I admit I've done a poor job at explaining this - the
> > "a priori" information we're talking about here for the RESTful
> > approach is just the same a priori information needed to understand a
> > schema. There's nothing else that is needed - check above.  With
> > WSDL, you need the a priori information of how to process the schemas
> > in use *and* the a priori information of the interface to that data.
> >
> > Do we agree to that last point, even if we may not agree on the
> > impact to the properties of the respective architectural styles?
> 
> Absolutely not.
> 
> I assume that when you say "schema" you mean it in the sense of DTD, W3C 
> XML Schema or RelaxNG.

Right.

> I'm afraid this is just wrong. Given a URI and a schema and just generic 
> URI and schema handling code, the _only_ things you can do are generic 
> URI and schema things

Absolutely true!!

> ... ie. nothing much beyond dereferencing and 
> validation.

Absolutely false!!

I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that you believed this.  Had I, we could
probably have saved lots of time!

Other generic things you can do include;

- setting the state of some resource (PUT)
- submitting some data for processing (POST)
- removing data (DELETE)
- locking a resource for private access (WebDAV LOCK)
- subscribing to the resource to be notified when it changes state
(Waka/Idokorro/KnowNow MONITOR/WATCH)

etc..

"generic URI things" are what the uniform interface is all about.

I'll hold back on responding to your other points, because IMO, this is
the whopper.

What say ye, fan of the Pi-Calculus?

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Wednesday, 8 January 2003 09:56:41 UTC